Thursday, November 17, 2005

Ex-MI5 boss: "ID cards useless"

"The House of Lords voted to reject the ID cards bill yesterday. The second house wants the draft legislation amended so that restrictions are placed on who would be allowed to use the cards to check a person's identity.

Peers were also unhappy that Home Office ministers said that they could not reveal the full cost of the plans. Baroness Scotland did reveal that the scheme will cost the Home Office £584m a year.Click Here

The defeat came as ex-MI5 chief Stella Rimington said that ID cards will be of no use in the fight against terror.

Speaking at the Association of Colleges annual conference in Birmingham, she said ID cards would not make us any safer:

"ID cards have possibly some purpose," the BBC quotes her as saying. "But I don't think that anybody in the intelligence services, particularly in my former service, would be pressing for ID cards."Register

6 Comments:

You probably know this but for the benefit of your readership: the venom isn't actually in the ID cards themselves, but in the National Identity Register (NIR) database. Jultra readers: DO READ the entire Bill, it's very revealing:

Heh, well I don't exactly have a giant readership here Gert unfortunately.

I completely agree with you though Gert, the 'card' bit is almost irrelevant, the NIR database has always been the enormous threat and the depth of it and what it means has been fairly masked by the likes of Blair and Clarke.